While Beast Wars is loved by tons of fans today, it's interesting to hear of a time where it was hated severely by fans. While Transformers fans are known to be hypocritical in addition to toxic at times, I can sort of see why they would display such behavior since this series was nothing like what they had before. The deviation from vehicles to organic animals was an entirely drastic one, especially compared to anything else that came out since then. However, if one were to look past that and the TRUKK NOT MUNKY shenanigans that happened at the time, what they have here might be a rather fun toyline to go over. Unlike G1 and the first half of G1, which consisted of rebranded toys, bricks, and kind of worthless gimmick shits compared to the earlier Minibots, Beast Wars was given fresh, new ideas to explore, taking any animal in the real world and making a robot out of it. One of those was Optimus Primal, who was initially a new version of the Autobot leader (with a previous bat figure) before he became his own character. Let's see how this great gorilla holds up.
Here is Primal in his beast mode. It's quite the silverback gorilla he's known for, albeit with some toyetic influences that are quite different from the Beast Wars CGI model. Do keep in mind these toys were made before the show was in production, and the show itself had its own liberties taken to deviate itself from the intent of the toyline initially being a continuation of the Autobot-Decepticon war instead of it being characters from the future who are sent to the past. Optimus Primal doesn't quite look as naturalistic to the actual beast mode due to the exposed robot parts, though the biceps at least have some sculpted fur details to make them somewhat blend in. In spite of those and hinges, gaps, and toyetic parts of the beast mode, he doesn't feel compromised compared to most other early Beast Wars toys. His articulation is very limited, with the arms having front and back movement as well as in and out in spite of the shoulder kibble folded down. The biceps ratchet around, and the elbows bend. The legs can be strengthened so you can then pose him for a chest-beating gimmick by pulling down a lever from the back after adjusting his arms. It's a little hard to get the gimmick working if the gears aren't set in the right spots, but it's manageable.
For a vintage vs Kingdom comparison, it's night and day in terms of proportions, realism, and engineering. One feels rigid while the other feels more organic. One prioritized the gimmicks while the other had the beast mode be A priority but not THE priority, which results in a great balance between it, the transformation, and robot mode. Also, the sizes are way different for the both of them, but that's because Ultras were pretty much chunky Voyagers from probably the pre-2010s while Primal specifically is a Voyager that sacrificed its size for finger and butterfly joint articulation and some of the gimmicks like the shoulder cannons and his arm blasters. Either way, the original version doesn't look too shabby as a gorilla in this mode.
Transformation is very basic. You literally stand the toy up, straighten the arms, and reveal a new head. That on its own would already make for an uninteresting transformation, but thankfully, Optimus Primal takes a few good traits from Punch/Counterpunch by virtue of using a few tricks to make the transformation a little more interesting than it could normally be, such as having the shoulder pads fold up, using the waist swivel in addition to straightening the feet, folding the feet down with pistons of their own after replacing the beast toes on the back, and turning the gorilla face into the robot mode chest by flipping it around to reveal the robot details. We'll see another Transformer take that sort of design philosophy and make it work in a way that a good majority of Beastformers fail to take advantage of, but for now, we'll say that Primal's transformation is at least salvaged by those transformation steps. As for his robot mode, it's very good! The proportions, while still gorilla-like, are perfect to the general character design, and while he may be bulkier than he normally is, it fits his otherwise powerful design. Optimus Primal takes advantage of not being a truck by being a hefty muscle bot that may break someone's skull because of how dense he feels. Sure, the back does have most of the gorilla junk unchanged, especially the gorilla butt, but that's nothing to get upset about on a limited yet still awesome toy.
The head sculpt is awesome! Sure, he lacks the mouth that the cartoon had, and while this was made before the cartoon, it still feels very Primal with the red eyes and the stylized antennae. Hell, it's not only the best old-school Prime head that beats the G1 and some G2 versions of Optimus, but it was a thing that briefly appeared on the cartoon for his Season 1 design. I do wish that the forehead wasn't scratched at the part where the red's exposed, though. Also, speaking of red, there is some peeking out from the ack, as we'll get to. His articulation is pretty much better than the beast mode articulation. His robot mode head can look left and right on either the swivel or in unison with the back piece on another panel. The arms have even more articulation this time while the waist swivels, the hips move around on these big ball joints, and the knees bend.
He has plenty of gimmicks to make up for his simple transformation. If you open up the right arm, you'll find a mace that has a skull at one end! It's attached to a piece of string for some swinging attacks, and it was the inspiration for the mutant head of Paleotrex in the Kingdom line when giving his head to Primal. On the other hand, you can pull on the tab, and out comes a spring-loaded missile launcher! It's different from how the show did it because instead of a whopping double-barrel arm cannon, it's integrated from the forearms and doesn't leave the arm dangling from the back. The missiles stored on the back can be used for this weapon, though because they're needed to be the same length as the ones used for another gimmick, they do look overly long on this weapon. Is that not enough for you? He has shoulder-mounted cannons that are spring-loaded as far as deploying them is concerned while they reveal twin Cyber Swords that can either be held on both hands or dual-bladed a la Darth Maul but predating him by 3 years. And to top it all off, if you lift the lever on the buttons, they activate a new feature for the lever on the back: spinning the forearms for new sword attacks instead of having the arms move in and out. How they were able to make that work on such a toy surprised me. He also has a mutant mask that was never in the show and is kinda reminiscent of a bat. Almost like a reference to the Basic Class toy that was made of the character in a two-pack with an Alligator Megatron with an included comic where the fiction of Beast Wars was entirely different from the cartoon. Some have decided to remove the mask, which is quite a rare thing for most old Beast Wars toys due to them being integrated into the robot heads. Megatron and Dinobot, to my knowledge, are the only toys to have them as separate pieces.
As far as repaints are concerned, you may notice that Optimus Primal's not quite like the original toy from the 90s. See, the original figure had red paint apps for the robot chest, a normal shade of blue for the swords, missiles, and robot head paint, the back of the robot head was not painted blue, the red eyes were brighter, and the blue paint apps were not metallic like on the Vintage release. Beyond that, there's no real significance in differences in terms of tooling.
There were some Lucky Draw releases of Prime, the likes of which were very much milked to a degree because Takara sure loved to make Lucky Draws whenever there is a new line to put focus on for one year only. However, these exist so far as JPEGs that the rest of the world generally has access to, but it's still better than owning an NFT.
There was also a clear red version that is in (hopefully) chunky translucent materials. It's meant to represent his powered-up appearance in the Beast Wars II movie. Only his robot head and hands are colored differently.
The Universe line brought the mold back into use after years of Primal having new bodies in the rest of the Beast Era. This repaint represents a corrupted version of the character under Unicron's influence. Between the different beast mode colors and the red Prime head almost feeling like Star Saber, this guy sure has a very distinct vibe compared to the traditional Primal colors.
HasTak later made a special 2-pack for the faction leaders of the Beast Era for Toys R Us in the US and most of the rest of the world, as part of the Beast Wars 10th Anniversary 2-pack. While the other toys were essentially repainted to better match the cartoon in addition to coming with pieces for the character Transmutate, Optimus Primal and Megatron have closer cartoon decoes as well as retooled robot heads that ditch the mutant head and go for show-accuracy all around. Primal takes this a step further by having the gorilla head and robot chest retooled to better match the cartoon design. He thankfully has all of the gimmicks that were already there, and this guy as well as Megatron look quite astounding in their retooled states as precursors to the more definitive versions in the Masterpiece and Kingdom lines.
All that would be perfect had it not been for the fact that Takara somehow thought it'd be a great idea to not reuse the retooled parts for the Telemocha line and essentially make a more screen-accurate deco for the toy at the same time. Sure, the gorilla head better matches the 10th-anniversary version, but that head sculpt isn't the one we just got in the show! Maybe it was their way of encouraging fans to get the more definitive versions but they have to get another toy, too.
And then Takara made a special repaint of Primal with the retooled parts for the Legends line. The details are crisper than before, though now he's got a somewhat different deco for the beast mode fur while the face and organic skin on the beast mode are a matte version of the gray that was on the previous screen-accurate attempts.
For another size comparison, here he is with his Kingdom counterpart. Yes, both of them are different in terms of design traits, articulation, accuracy, size, but they're still both good in their own rights. Much like how the Kingdom version is great for a display as well as having improved engineering and articulation, Vintage Primal makes for a great toy due to its size, gimmicks, and chunky plastic. Even without the retooled parts, he still makes for a great purchase, especially if you got him for basically Cyberverse Warrior Class money before Christmas! Even if you don't get him at that price, he's still more worth the money than most modern Leader Class figures due to his heft and gimmicks. This Primal is going to be a better purchase than Studio Series 86 Coronation Starscream, that's for sure.
Final ranking: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ and a half out of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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